date() should not append a final "\n" ?!?

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> On Thu, 19 Aug 1999 11:43:46 +0200 (CEST), Kurt Hornik <Kurt.Hornik@ci.tuwien.ac.at> said:

>>>>> Martin Maechler writes:
>>>>> On Thu, 19 Aug 1999 10:45:35 +0200,
>>>>> Martin Maechler (MM) wrote:

    MM> Between R 0.63.2 and 0.64, the behavior of 
    MM> date()
    MM> has been changed in order to become platform independent.
    MM> It now uses POSIX calls, basically

    MM> time_t t;
    MM> time(&t);
    MM> return ctime(&t);


    MM> This currently returns (for me on Sun SPARC Solaris)

    >>>>> date()
    MM> [1] "Thu Aug 19 10:36:28 1999\n"

    MM> where I think the final "\n" is really UNdesired.

    FrL> Yes!

    >> Okay,
    >> I checked  Lewine (1991) "POSIX Programmer's Guide" :

    >> POSIX specifies that ctime() has a final "\n" 
    >> (before the string terminator \0)
    >> and always length 26 (incl. terminator)

    >> Hence, we have to drop the final "\n",
    >> already in function R_Date() which is [in src/main/platform.c]
    >> currently
    >> char *R_Date()
    >> {
    >>   time_t t;
    >>   time(&t);
    >>   return ctime(&t);
    >> }

    >> How can we drop is this done in the most elegant way?
    >> (without having to allocate a  char[26] ?)

    KH> Be brutal, do

    KH> date <- function() substring(.Internal(date()), 1, 24)

Kurt, I said
		"most elegant way"
about 5 lines above..

And also for the C API, we want  R_Date() to be correct.

{{I really wonder that the POSIX people where thinking when they
  appended the "\n";  
  appending afterwards is always much easier than removing....
}}
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